Not sure how common this issue is, or even how badly I may be missing something simple, but I am a first time usuer having some serious problems.

Some background: old HDD running Windows 7 developed too many bad sectors and is bricked. I'm attempting to install Ubuntu 12.04 on a fresh 1TB drive by booting from a liveCD USB flash drive. I've not been able to get past the initial menu screen, however, as the process stalls out shortly after selecting an option (both boot from drive and install to drive). I've tried multiple USB drives as well as CDs, modified the boot order, flashed BIOS, and even tried booting with only the flash drive and the keyboard connected with the same results.Typically what I observe is that the OS begins what I think is compliling, listing drivers and components before freezing on one. When the keyboard is plugged in, its the keyboard driver, before I flashed BIOS, it was a BIOS related item, now its an unknown entry. The computer seems to be reading the drive (idicated by USB light flashing or CD drive reving) for roughly 10 minutes with no progress, followed by the drives going quiet.

Some spec info:

Motherboard: ASUS P5Q Pro, BIOS version 2102 (latest version), Intel chipset CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz

help would be appriciated!